Music, Art, and Mysticism

The following quotes are from Evelyn Underhill's book Mysticism published in 1911. (Considered a classic by many in the realm of the study of spiritual consciousness.) What's interesting, is that in 1910 Wassily Kandinsky wrote his theoretical study, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, in which he examines the psychological effects of color with analogies between music and art. Music was a strong influence in his art, having learned piano and cello at an early age.

"The Earthly artist, because perception brings with it the imperative longing for expression, tries to give us in colour, sound or words a hint of his ecstasy, his glimpse of truth. Only those who have tried, know how small a fraction of his vision he can, under the most favourable circumstance, contrive to represent. The mystic too, tries very hard to tell an unwilling world his secret. But in his case, the difficulties are enormously increased. First, there is the huge disparity between his mind and the mind of the world. His audience must be bewitched as well as addressed, caught up to something of his state, before they can be made to understand."

(-Evelyn Underhill, p. 76 - Mysticism, London: Methuen, 1911.)

Another paragraph and a half down the page she goes on to say -

"Yet of all the arts music alone shares with great mystical literature the power of waking in us a response to the life-movement of the universe: brings us - we know not how - news of its exultant passions and its incomparable peace."

To Underhill, music was the closest form of expression to mystical literature, so it makes sense that Kandinsky, a painter heavily influenced by music, created the first formal nonrepresentational painting. (The same year he wrote his aforementioned study.)

My point is that abstract expressionism is a valuable form of mystical expression, more closely in tune with musical expression than classic painting depicting physical reality. Had Evelyn Underhill wrote her book a few decades later has abstract expressionism really begins to take root, I feel she would be inclined to agree with me.